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Customer experience or CX has always been central to building a brand and the business. The increasing prevalence of digital, mobile and ease of information accessibility has altered this landscape. It has influenced how we develop, manage and monitor CX. This landscape shift was significant enough, to spur big agency Saatchi & Saatchi to acquire CX specialist MercerBell, in order to remain relevant in this space.17

In this week’s 5-minute read, we take a brief look at what customer experience is and why the current shifts should matter to you.

What CX is

CX is essentially about the interaction and engagement between customers and a brand throughout the customer journey. It is more than just selling a product or a service. It is about marketing the right experience to the right customer. Good CX is based on shared values between a brand and a customer. To create good CX, businesses must develop a deep understanding of their customers.

CX Customer Experience Matters

Some Definitions of CX

“The sum-total of how customers engage with your company and brand. It is your customer’s perception of your business including all physical, psychological, emotional and sensory touchpoint’s that occur throughout the entire arc of being a customer. This perception drives customer behaviours and customer loyalty, ultimately affecting your company’s bottom line.” 1

“It is about bringing together every touch point to create consistent, thought-out interactions with your brand. It’s becoming more and more important at every level, from small businesses to enterprise brands.” 2

“A Customer Experience (CX) is a Customer’s perception of their rational, physical, emotional, subconscious, and psychological interaction with any part of an organisation. This perception affects Customer behaviours and builds memories, which drive Customer Loyalty and affects the economic value an organisation generates.” 21

The Customer Journey Is Where the Customer Goes

CX is about making the customer happy.

Today’s mobile-empowered customers begin their customer journey at a brand’s website. It is one of the first port of call a customer makes and it sets the tone for the remaining overall customer experience. Another significant touchpoint in the customer journey is where the brand’s social media channels are. Social media recluse Apple recognised this, and recently began to channel resources into tweeting tips and tutorials.14

Measuring CX

Today’s revolutionised customer journey, provides many new opportunities for brands to shape and improve the customer experience. Each touchpoint in the customer journey is where the brand interacts with the customer. To the customer, it is a decision point.2 To the business, they are opportunities to measure and improve the CX. This is important in order to understand what is keeping, and will continue, to keep customers happy. But before you can improve CX, you need to measure it.

Peter Drucker “What gets measured gets improved” 6

A good clue to use when deciding what is important to measure, is to also decide what matters to the customer. What matters to the customer, matters to the business.3 Each business will have to determine what is important to them – there is no one set of metrics for all.

CX Metrics to measure – “One man’s ceiling, is another man’s floor”

And before you start measuring it, ensure it is actionable. If you cannot use or action it, there is no point in measuring it.3

CX measurement metrics3

Social media/brand mentions and engagement

Response rates

Customer loyalty

Customer satisfaction

Forecast accuracy

How to Measure CX

To measure if the customer is experiencing the brand at its best, you want to understand customer needs and identify gaps in their experience.9,18 You need data to predict, to outline customer behaviour trends and patterns.9 And this is where a business deploys customer intelligence tools.

Customer intelligence tools19

Big Data

Social Media Analytics

Customer Relations Management Systems

Focus groups

Insight Communities

Five common CX metrics. 22,23,24,25,26

Net Promoter Score (NPS) – Percentage of customers who would promote or detract a brand

CX Directions and Trends

CX will continue to become more important than products or service when looking at what impacts customer behaviour. It will define other priorities.16 Companies need to enable and optimise their workforce to keep their customers happy through personalised interactions and experiences10 that will drive overall positive ROI. 9,11,12,24

Centralise your data, to support and simplify the customer experience by becoming easier to do business with through reducing customer effort.9

Combine your data sources to gain holistic views and insights of the customer that will enable data-driven marketing, delivering a better quality of content.9,18

Develop deeper engagement and build more meaningful relationships with your customer by using embedded customer service facilities and permission-based customer intelligence tools as opposed to ad-hoc surveys9,11,20 – for example, Amazon’s Mayday button15